Lead developer for Compiz, Sam Spilsbury, says he sees little need to develop Compiz for Wayland due to the increasing fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. Spilsbury writes "What does compiz actually provide to users of these systems? [...] None of this functionality that user wants really depends on our compositing engine. There's nothing so special about our compositing engine that gives it a reason to exist [...] This is the real practical toll of fragmentation amongst the Linux ecosystem. It's not just that there are multiple implementations of the wheel. There are multiple implementations of entire cars which do almost the same thing, but a little different from everyone else. Some say this is the free software's greatest strength. Now that I know the personal and technical toll of fragmentation, I see it as its greatest weakness."

I believe he was referring to the fragmentation between Linux distributions vs Something like Windows or Android which comes as a complete artefact from a particular supplier.

Yeah I appreciate that, his project could equally be accused of adding to the fragmentation as its a non-standard WM (though granted a highly popular "non-standard"). He's entire project is based on the principle that people can replace the underlying window manager behind their desktop environment of choice with another windows manager.

So I was more speculating about whether there was additional motives behind his rant.

There are a lot of changes happening in Linux which are doing more to push Compiz out of the market place (eg KDEs Kwin). So if his rant was purely about the fact that some distributions are adopting a replacement for X11 (which, to be fair, is fairly unpopular in Linux anyway, and up until yet, there hadn't been any viable alternative), then he's coming off slightly hypocritical given his architecture is designed to replace the desktops default.

I'm probably reading too much into things, and there certainly is an issue of fragmentation in Linux. But Wayland is one of the few instances where I think the re-engineering that's going on is deserved.